Character Profile: Grace Runyon

It’s easy to keep your faith when everything in life is going well, but what happens when it’s not? Grace Runyon had no complaints, and then life happened. She had the gift of healing, but she wasn’t able to heal herself, so she ran away from her problems to search for some answers.

Grace is an average looking girl from the old, traditional community of Woodside, Tennessee. An only child, she followed her high school sweetheart to college in Asheville. With her ability to help heal people, Grace joins a Physician’s Assistant program while Jonathan goes to med school.

They finish school, get married, and have a son. Grace is doing what she loves with the people she loves. Everything is beautiful, until life happens.

A car accident takes the life of her son, along with her parents. Then cancer claims Jonathan. Grace can’t cope, so in the middle of the funeral, she takes off. Driving for days, she only stops when she runs out of road. She doesn’t remember everything from the trip. All she knows is that she’s in northern Michigan with the water, the waves, and the snow. Though it’s drastically different than life in Tennessee, Grace decides it’s part of God’s plan. She stays.

Though she’s shy, Grace makes a couple of friends, including Marliss, her life saver. They can talk about anything. It’s Marliss that helps Grace find work as a PA at a clinic. She wasn’t planning to work as a PA again, not with all of her history, but the job feels right. At the clinic, she meets her other good friend, Matty. Grace doesn’t have an overly active social life, but with her friends by her side she’s not a hermit either.

And then there are the men in her life – Randy, her neighbor, Eddy, the little boy she cares for, and Ted, Eddy’s father and the man whose house she bought.

Then there’s love. Somehow Ted and Eddy find room in their hearts for Grace, and she ends up engaged again. That’s when she realizes things are really turning around. She isn’t thrilled about spending her life in East Bay, Michigan, but it’s where her fiance is, so it’s where she’ll stay. Eddy’s there too, and he’s too important to walk away from.

Grace has suffered through much, and it looks like God is truly using the pain in her life to make something beautiful. Though her faith has been fragile, especially through the worst time, knowing Jesus helped her keep her sanity.